Michigan Reading Journal Michigan Reading Journal

Volume 53 Issue 2 Article 6

February 2021

Assessing Young Children’s Language and Nonverbal Assessing Young Children’s Language and Nonverbal

Communication in Oral Personal Narratives Communication in Oral Personal Narratives

Shelley Stagg Peterson shelleystagg.peterson@utoronto.ca, shelleystagg.peterson@utoronto.ca

Nazila Eisazadeh University of Toronto, Nazila.eisazadeh@mail.utoronto.ca

Andrea Liendo University of Toronto, andrea.liendo@mail.utoronto.ca

Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/mrj

Part of the Early Childhood Education Commons, Elementary Education Commons, and the Language

and Literacy Education Commons

Recommended Citation Recommended Citation Stagg Peterson, Shelley; Eisazadeh, Nazila; and Liendo, Andrea (2021) "Assessing Young Children’s Language and Nonverbal Communication in Oral Personal Narratives," Michigan Reading Journal: Vol. 53 : Iss. 2 , Article 6. Available at: https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/mrj/vol53/iss2/6

This Bridging Research to Practice is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@GVSU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Michigan Reading Journal by an authorized editor of ScholarWorks@GVSU. For more information, please contact scholarworks@gvsu.edu.

Assessing Young Children’s Language and Nonverbal Communication in Oral Assessing Young Children’s Language and Nonverbal Communication in Oral Personal Narratives Personal Narratives

Cover Page Footnote Cover Page Footnote Authors’ note: We are very grateful to participating teachers, ECEs and children, and to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding this research through a Partnership Grant.

This bridging research to practice is available in Michigan Reading Journal: https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/mrj/vol53/iss2/6

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Assessing Young Children’s Language and Nonverbal Communication in Oral Personal Narratives

by Shelley Stagg Peterson, Nazila Eisazadeh, and Andrea Liendo

Our research starts with the premise that language is foundational to children’s literacy learning and devel-opment. As reflected in early childhood curricula (e.g., Michigan Department of Education, 2010; Ontario Ministry of Education, 2006), and in research (e.g., Dickinson & Porche, 2011), supporting young chil-dren’s language and nonverbal communication in early years settings through assessment-informed pedagogy is of great importance. We collaborated with kinder-garten teachers in northern rural Canadian kindergar-ten classrooms to develop assessment tools to help us understand what children can do with language and nonverbal communication modes.

We started by reviewing available oral language assess-ments for primary classrooms, finding three types:

1. Tools that assess children’s receptive language These tools (e.g., Clay, 2007; Crevola & Vineis,

2004) measure the accuracy in children’s repetition of sentences of increasing syntactic complexity after hearing an adult say the sentences.

Nazila Eisazadeh Andrea Liendo

2. Tools that assess children’s language as they interact with adults

Assessment criteria within these tools include actions such as using language to initiate conver-sations or asking questions and articulation of speech sounds so that adults can understand what is being communicated (e.g., Dickinson et al., 2003).

3. Tools that assess children’s language in everyday inter-actions

Assessment criteria include demonstration of phonological awareness, knowledge of content and structure of language, use of specialized vocabu-lary, and use of social conventions like turn-taking in conversations within these tools (e.g., British Columbia Education, 2004; Scholastic Canada, 2011).

Subsequent steps in our assessment tool development process, described in detail elsewhere (Peterson et al., 2018), involved video-recording and analyzing 2,584 utterances in 81 video-recordings of children’s

ShelleyStagg Peterson

Michigan Reading Journal16

Bridging Research and Practice - Assessing Young Children’s Language and Nonverbal Communication

construction and dramatic play. From our analysis, we created an oral language assessment tool for use in play and small-group learning activities (Portier & Peterson, 2017). Participating teachers have used this tool to inform their teaching and reporting to par-ents. Speech-language pathologists in the schools, who typically use standardized tests, welcomed this evidence of identified children’s everyday language to comple-ment the information that they gather.

However, the tool is limited to the assessment of the social purposes of language and nonverbal communica-tion. Agreeing with Zhang (2015) that it is important to have a range of assessment tools that fulfill multiple purposes (including tracking children’s progress in learning, supporting teaching and identifying children who need additional support), we created another tool, which we introduce in this paper. Viewing children’s homes and communities as containing an abundance of cultural and cognitive resources, or funds of knowl-edge, for children’s language, literacy, and conceptual learning (Hedges et al., 2011; Moll et al., 1992), we put children’s stories about their home and/or commu-nity experiences at the centerpiece of our assessment approach.

Our research involved the collaborative design of tasks for eliciting children’s personal narratives, together with a framework for analyzing language features within the personal narratives. With the overall purpose of using our analysis to develop an assessment tool for teachers’ use, our study was guided by these research questions:

1. What are the characteristics of oral narratives told by participating five-year-old children in response to three open-ended tasks?

2. How do children’s narratives vary in response to each task?

After summarizing previous research on oral language assessment, we report on our development of the Language and Nonverbal Communication Assessment (LNCA) and on our analysis of children’s narratives. We use the LNCA to assess one child’s personal narrative and conclude with a discussion of how the tool can be

used and adapted for classrooms beyond those in our collaborative project.

Literature Review: Assessment of Children’s Oral Narratives

Teachers, researchers and speech-language pathologists have frequently used children’s oral narratives as data sources for assessing language (Lucero, 2015; Mendez et al., 2018). Expected elements (e.g., characters, plot, setting) and relationships between them vary across cultures (Booth, 2005; Bruner, 1986). For example, in narratives of many Indigenous communities, the characters may carry out a series of actions in loose-ly-connected episodes. In European-based narratives, the characters’ intentions may guide actions as the protagonist overcomes a challenge (Hanson, 2009; Iseke, 2013).

Some researchers have suggested that children find it easier to demonstrate their linguistic and narra-tive knowledge through retelling stories, rather than through creating their own stories from wordless pic-ture books (Lever & Sénéchal, 2011). These research-ers hypothesize that wordless picture books provide models of story structure and potential vocabulary and sentence structures that children may use in their retellings (Kaderavek & Sulzby, 2000). Relationships between children’s use of syntax and their oral narra-tives have been found in studies involving monolingual, English-speaking children (Kaderavek & Sulzby, 2000; Lever & Sénéchal, 2011), and between vocabulary and narrative competence in research involving monolin-gual English-speaking and Spanish-English-speaking children (Heilmann et al., 2010; Wood et al, 2017).

In recent studies based on this premise, researchers found that syntactical structures used by 5-8-year-old bilingual children in Spanish (their L1) and in English oral narratives varied, but their use of macrostructural elements (overarching structure of the story, includ-ing relationships between narrative elements such as setting, problem, attempts to solve and resolution of the problem) was consistent (Lucero, 2015; Mendez et al., 2018). There were no significant cross-language

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Shelley Stagg Peterson, Nazila Eisazadeh, and Andrea Liendo

associations between narrative macrostructures in the two narratives told by Samoan- and English-speaking preschoolers after they had listened to a story through headphones while viewing the images of an e-picture book, however (Westerveld, 2014). Children’s expres-sive vocabulary scores were significantly related to their performance on macrostructure elements within, but not across, languages. As was found in studies of monolingual English-speaking children, the bilingual children’s vocabulary appeared to be associated with quality of story retelling or macrostructure within the same language.

Other researchers have found that children’s co-created narratives in dramatic play provide valuable infor-mation about their knowledge of narrative structure (Altidor-Brooks et al., 2019; Dunn, 2008; Genishi & Dyson, 2014). In their dramatic play narratives, chil-dren actively drew upon their experiences and cultural knowledge of roles and social expectations, as well as narratives, to develop characters and create storylines that aligned with characters’ roles, intentions and per-sonalities. This body of research was particularly influ-ential to the creation of our Language and Nonverbal

Communication Assessment tool, as it aligned with our valuing of children’s funds of knowledge. We describe the development of the tool in the following section.

Development of the Language and Nonverbal Communication

Assessment (LNCA)Teaching teams of a teacher and an early childhood educator (ECE) from five kindergarten classrooms, each in a different rural community in northern Ontario, Canada, participated in our study. In Ontario, kindergarten is collaboratively taught by a teacher and an ECE. Twenty-seven girls and 17 boys responded to one of three tasks inviting them to tell a personal narrative (see Figure 1). Participating teachers selected the storytelling task that they believed best aligned with their students’ interests and abilities. The children were five years old at the time of the study. Eight children are Indigenous and speak an Indigenous English dialect. All of the teachers are female and non-Indigenous. They and participating non-Indigenous children speak English as their mother tongue.

Please choose one of these options to try out with children whose parents give consent. If you modify the prompt because it is not working well to elicit children’s language, please ensure that your voice is recorded, as well as the child’s, so we know how you improved on the prompt.Narrative Prompt: Say to the child: Tell me a story about a time when you had fun (with your family/with a friend/in your community/anywhere you choose).Toy/Play Prompt:Please create a place for these 2 people/animals/creatures to live or to have an adventure. After the child has created the setting, say to the child: Tell me a story about what will happen when the two characters are in this place you have made.Drawing Prompt: Say to the child: Please draw a picture of a time when you had fun (with your family/with a friend/in your community/anywhere you choose). If the child tells a story while

Tell me what is happening in your picture.

Figure 1. Personal Oral Narrative Prompts

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Preparation for Data CollectionNaz and Shelley met with participating teacher-ECE teams to introduce the project, offering three potential tasks for eliciting children’s personal narratives and three potential assessment categories (e.g., fluency, spe-cific vocabulary, and narrative features). Together, we discussed how the tasks and assessment criteria could be adapted for their classroom contexts.

We also viewed videos of children engaged in dramatic and construction play, gathered as part of our larger project, to try out ways of recording information on the LNCA and to add specific criteria to the three general categories. The teachers and ECEs used tallies within each category, for example, circling particular features and writing some of the words, phrases, gestures, into-nation and other nonverbal communication modes that children used. Because the children’s narratives were to be video-recorded for our analysis, we held a practice session during which one member of the teacher-ECE team told a story in response to one task, and the other team member used an iPad to video-record her col-league. We then did some troubleshooting to ensure that everyone felt comfortable with the video recording process. We talked about informed consent and volun-tary participation in the study, and suggested further improvements to the tasks and assessment categories. Through this process, we created the three different tasks in Figure 1.

Teacher teams uploaded 44 videos to the project’s web-site after trying one of the tasks with children whose parents/caregivers had given written consent. Videos were transcribed for analysis.

Data Analysis and Development of Assessment ToolThrough inductive analysis, we further refined the LNCA. We wanted to capture a range of linguistic features of language and nonverbal communication and features of the narratives themselves. Starting with the criteria and categories from our meeting with partici-pants, we viewed uploaded videos and identified addi-tional criteria related to relationships between characters and events, monitoring for meaning, enhancing mean-ing multimodally and use of grammatical features. After

determining how to describe the range of competence that children demonstrated in each of the categories, Andrea and Naz analyzed the transcripts individually and then we all met to discuss their analyses. We found that the LNCA needed further refinement to enhance clarity and to combine overlapping categories.

As shown in figure 2, the final version of the LNCA includes these language categories: language fluency, narrative features, ways of connecting events/ideas to theme, monitoring meaning if there is confusion/miss-ing information, use of non-verbal language or hooks/expressions to enhance meaning/engage audience, vocabulary, and grammar. In this final stage of develop-ing the assessment tool, we inserted check boxes beside each descriptor within each of the language categories. We placed the specific descriptors within each category in descending order according to what we perceive, based on our experience as teachers of young children and our reading of the research literature, as a progres-sion toward greater competence.

After refining the LNCA, we assessed the usefulness of the three storytelling prompts/tasks. The toy task was used in 12 of the videos, the drawing task in 17 videos, and the storytelling task was used in 15 videos. We compared and contrasted percentages of each descriptor across the three tasks.

Because teachers and ECEs did some prompting to support children’s oral storytelling, we also analyzed their prompts. Inductive analysis of the transcripts led to our development of these categories.

The teacher:1. repeats all or part of the child’s response; 2. shows interest (e.g., “mmhm,” “I see!,” “okay,”

“really?”) 3. asks for more information (e.g., “Where did you go

fishing?” or “Did you go on a boat?”)

We calculated frequencies of each teacher prompt type for each of the storytelling prompts/tasks to determine which task appeared to require greater teacher input in order for children to tell their stories.

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Figure 2. Language and Nonverbal Communication Assessment (LNCA)

Shelley Stagg Peterson, Nazila Eisazadeh, and Andrea Liendo

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Characteristics of Children’s Oral Narratives and Teacher Prompting

Participating five-year-old children’s personal narratives ranged from having no words, as one child used gesture and other nonverbal modes in their narrative, to more than 1,250 words. The average number of words in children’s narratives was 142.8. Most narratives were approximately 50 words. Most children provided infor-mation about the name or role of at least one character in their narrative, although a few children referred to characters only using pronouns and a few provided information about multiple features of characters. The events and ideas in most children’s narratives were loosely connected, though some children used con-junctions to connect them and even explained causal relationships between them. A few children included one idea or event.

To enhance meaning, many children communicated multimodally, most frequently by using gestures or a combination of gesture, intonation, and sound effect. They also used a question or invitation to hook their audience.

When the meaning became unclear because of missing or confusing information, a few children attempted to make their story clearer to their audience. For example, Joe said, “this one being bad, so that’s why they put the one in time out,” to explain why one of his figurines was moved away from the others. For the most part, however, the children did not attempt to make changes to their narrative in order to clarify meaning.

Most narratives included more than four specific words. Often these words were nouns (e.g., dolphin, tarantula, elevator, submarine). When responding to teachers’ questions, children often omitted subject and object pronouns. When they did use pronouns, they generally used the correct form for the context. Children were more likely to use verb tenses incorrectly than correctly.

Although teacher prompting was not our initial focus, as we were interested in the children’s language, we noted that teachers used a number of prompts

throughout the children’s storytelling. The range in number of teacher prompts per video was 2 to 24 in the toy task videos, 2 to 32 in the storytelling task videos, and 4 to 123 in the drawing task videos. The average number of prompts for the toy task was 9. For the sto-rytelling task, the average was 13, and for the drawing task, the average was 48. In 41 of the 44 videos, teach-ers asked for information specific to the story at some point in the interactions with children. Questioning was especially frequent when teachers used the drawing task, as teachers asked for clarification of what was in the drawing. Transcripts for this task often contained much more teacher talk than transcripts for the other two tasks. When using the storytelling prompt, teachers most frequently displayed interest to encourage chil-dren to continue or elaborate their story.

Characteristics of Narratives by TaskChildren’s narratives of more than 100 words were more likely to be in response to the narrative and toy/play tasks than to the drawing task. Children who responded to the narrative task were less likely to have missing or confusing information when telling their oral tales. They often used multiple specific words in response to the narrative task. For example, Tita used the words: trampoline, water park, bowling, and snow, when telling her story about a time when she had fun with family and/or friends. Narratives elicited by the narrative task were also more likely to include multiple details of characters. For example, Carlo explained, “I got to stay with Kona, the dog. It was a tiny dog. She's that tall [indicates height with hand]. That’s how tall.”

The toy/play with props task, in comparison, appeared to provide greater opportunities for the children to enhance meaning/foster audience engagement through gestures, intonation, sound/effect, and/or hooks and voice expression. Children readily used the toys/props to gesture or move across their imaginative storyboard when telling their stories. Some children also added intonation or sound effect and/or hooks and voice expressions to these gestures. Caitlyn, for instance, said, “Waa waaa waa woof!” when a kangaroo puppet was trying to intimidate the owl puppet from coming into the home (see Figure 3). Caitlyn also inched the owl

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Winter 2021, Vol. 53, No. 2 21

towards the home she was constructing for the kanga-roo and made the kangaroo puppet move up and down while making sound effects.

This multimodal process, particularly the visual aids and the construction play material available for this task, appeared to support the children in connecting their events/ideas to the theme using causal relation-ships and conjunctions. For example, while manipu-lating construction play material to create the story’s setting (the animal home), Caitlyn said, “He doesn’t wanna . . . the kangaroo doesn’t want the owl to go in the home because he’s building the owl home right now and he doesn’t want it to go in the home.” However, since these props were visible to the audience, children were also less likely to provide greater details of the character(s) in their story, such as role, relationship, feelings, and motivation. Caitlyn did not orally explain the motivations, for instance, behind the kangaroo not wanting the owl to come to the home Caitlyn was building. The two modes, gesture and sound effects, were often more prevalent than talk in children’s narra-tives that involved toys or props.

Using the LNCA to Assess One Child’s Oral Narrative

Figure 4 shows how one teacher has used the LNCA to assess Susan’s oral narrative. We include part of the

transcript of Susan’s story (which evolved into multiple stories) and her teacher’s prompts.

Teacher: Tell me a story about a time when you had fun with your family or friends.

Susan: I went fishing and I had fun and I caught my first fish.

Teacher: Awesome!Susan: I had the toy boat and I ride it all the way

back to the bridge. It was out of batteries so my dad took it and put the new batteries and I ride it again. It was really hard to catch em’ when it go under the boat (Susan mimics the action of the fish swimming under the boat). Submarines can do dat.

Teacher: Cool!Susan: All the boats are different. My dad bought

me one for fun… .Oh and something else! I went to the circus and I went to the big swings that go high. When I went on those swings, I went on that boat. It goes zoom and it go different way like that (Susan imitates a swinging motion with her hand). The other boat went high and I was at the top and it makes it scary ‘cuz you go way up (Susan imitates the swinging motion with her hands this time with more vigor).

Teacher: I’d get scared too.Susan: I went on the different one. Did you know

Figure 3. Telling Story with Props

Shelley Stagg Peterson, Nazila Eisazadeh, and Andrea Liendo

Michigan Reading Journal22

those things where you…the roller coa…I went on one roller coaster.

Teacher: Wow!Susan: It goes up and down (Susan mimics the roller

coaster movement with her arm).Teacher: Was that in Thunder Bay or Toronto?Susan: Toronto. I went with my baby cousin. It’s

Eva. Eva plays with me. Her know how to say.

Teacher: What does she say?

Susan: Her can say lettersTeacher: Is that the end of your story?Susan: No.Teacher: Another story?Susan: I got another one ‘bout CHRISTMAS!!!Teacher: Next time, okay?In this part of the transcript, Susan introduced the boat that her father had bought and then provided a causal relationship, explaining that since the boat was out of batteries, her dad replaced them for the boat to

Figure 4. Susan’s Language Assessment

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work again: “It was out of batteries, so my dad took it and put new batteries, and I rode it again.” Susan also used gesture to enhance meaning and increase audience engagement by enacting the quick movements of fish under her fishing boat to explain that fish were diffi-cult to catch when swimming underneath a boat. She used expressions such as “Oh, and something else!” to capture the attention of the listener and give further details about the story. She used more than four specific words in her narrative (e.g., batteries, submarine, boat, roller coaster, circus). She used the correct verb tense when making comments such as, “It goes zoom and it goes a different way like that” to describe the swings she went on at the circus. Furthermore, she often used full sentences, with both the subject and the predicate.

Wider Use of the Language and Nonverbal Communication

AssessmentIn our development of the LNCA, we have attempted to address previously-documented concerns about early years assessments: a lack of validity, lack of collegial per-spectives, limited value for different contexts, and lack of capacity to show change in children’s learning over time (Blaiklock, 2008). The LNCA has been devel-oped as a collaboration between teachers, ECEs and university researchers through analysis of 44 children’s oral narratives. It reflects a wide range of perspectives on aspects of children’s language and nonverbal com-munication that should be included in an assessment. Validity is high, as teachers assess samples of children’s personal narratives, which have long been recognized as authentic texts (Booth, 2005; Bruner, 1986). The LNCA assesses nonverbal communication modes, as well as features of children’s language. Additionally, our use of open-ended tasks allows children to draw on their funds of knowledge (Hedges et al., 2011; Moll et al., 1992), resulting in greater relevance and potential value across classroom contexts. Although teachers and ECEs only gathered samples at one time of the year, we see potential for repeating this assessment at the end of the school year to enable observations of change over time in children’s language and nonverbal communi-cation to tell a personal story. We also see potential for

using this assessment checklist as a springboard within a larger repertoire of assessment tools (e.g., Best Start Expert Panel on Early Learning, 2007) that continually assess a child’s knowledge and skills from a develop-mental perspective and offer teachers suggestions for next steps.

Our analysis of participating children’s responses to the three tasks shows that each one offers a context for highlighting particular features of children’s language and nonverbal communication. Given that gather-ing language samples requires one-on-one time with students, teachers collaborating with us are leaning toward using the narrative task. The narrative task does not require props and our analysis shows that teachers did less prompting. Additionally, the narratives of many children responding to the task were at least as elabo-rated narratives responding to the other two tasks. They included at least as many narrative and multimodal features as did those responding to the drawing and toy/prop tasks, as well.

We recognize that gathering language samples using video-recordings—a practice that is manageable in classrooms where an ECE and teacher work together—may not be feasible in other classrooms. We offer the following five extensions of our research:

1. Pair students up in the classroom so that they can tell each other narratives about a time they had fun with family/friends (e.g., family activities during various seasons). Props (e.g., puppets) can be avail-able to facilitate students’ storytelling.

2. While students are telling their stories, teachers can move around the room and informally assess the narratives using the LNCA.

3. As a follow-up to storytelling, students could draw/write/dramatize the stories, perhaps in multiple languages to celebrate the children’s home lan-guages.

4. Children could tell stories to students from older grades who are their paired reading partners. The older partners could video-record the storytelling for teachers as part of their assessment documenta-tion.

Shelley Stagg Peterson, Nazila Eisazadeh, and Andrea Liendo

Michigan Reading Journal24

5. While children are sharing stories in “show and tell, author’s chair” or similar contexts, teachers might use the LNCA to assess their language and nonver-bal communication.

This version of the LNCA is our initial attempt at creating a multimodal assessment tool with an empha-sis on oral narrative. We will be modifying it in future years, as we gather narrative samples from a larger group of children in kindergarten and also in Grade 1. We will also more closely examine teachers’ prompts to determine the relationship between prompts and chil-dren’s language. Another follow-up to this research is to create a teaching resource with videos of children’s oral language and nonverbal communication that reflect patterns in performance of children by age and time of year. In this way, teachers will be able to make judg-ments about their children’s language and nonverbal communication modes while telling personal narratives, in comparisons with those of peers in similar contexts. Additionally, in future collaborative action research activities with participating teachers, we hope to develop teaching practices that build on what children show they can do with language in their narratives, and collaboratively reflect on their effectiveness.

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Author BiographiesShelley Stagg Peterson is a professor in the Department of Curriculum, Learning and Teaching at the University of Toronto, Canada. A former rural elementary teacher, Shelley now teaches and conducts research on young children’s writing and language learning, as well as play-based learning and rural educa-tion. Nazila Eisazadeh is a registered early childhood edu-cator and academic tutor. She graduated with her PhD in Language and Literacies Education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of

Shelley Stagg Peterson, Nazila Eisazadeh, and Andrea Liendo

Toronto. She is a former instructor at the University of Western Ontario, and her research interests are narra-tive inquiry, early childhood education, multiliteracies, culturally responsive pedagogy, as well as discourse and identity. Andrea Liendo is a retired teacher who spent 31 years teaching young children. Having taught in North America and South America, she has a broad variety of experiences. Currently she is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada.

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